How To Waste A Billion: Use It To Fight Global Warming

Lost Opportunity: The world reportedly "invested" $1 billion a day last year to fight global warming. What a waste. Properly invested, a billion a day would yield productive results.

According to the Climate Policy Initiative, $359 billion was invested in 2012 to limit global warming. That's a nice pile of cash. But of course it wasn't enough to do the job. Media portal EurActiv.com reports that total was "barely half the $700 billion per year that the World Economic Forum has said is needed to tackle climate change."

Sounds a lot like the war on poverty that America has been losing since it was declared in 1964 by President Johnson. When asked why the billions spent on easing poverty hadn't moved the poor out of their financial misery, Sargent Shriver, who ran the war as head of Johnson's Office of Economic Opportunity, said the government didn't spend enough.

The story's the same today. U.S. taxpayers have shelled out $3.7 trillion to cover welfare payments over the past five years, according to data from Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions' staff. Despite the largess, the poor are still poor. (See editorial above.)

Then there's the $1 trillion economic stimulus legislation that the Democrats passed in 2009 at the command of President Obama. Where are we in 2013? The economy's still struggling, and the workforce continues to shrink. New jobs aren't staying up with demand — and in fact are being destroyed by government policy.

Yet many supporters of the stimulus, economist Paul Krugman chief among them, say it hasn't been effective because we haven't spent enough.

Rather than waste other people's money, governments should let people keep what's theirs so they're able to invest or spend as they please. Which brings up the question: How much can a billion dollars a day buy?

It would buy nearly a million shares of wealth-generating Google stock. Or start 100,000 businesses — at the average $10,000-per-startup cost that's been established by Wells Fargo. Those businesses would hire hundreds of thousands of workers.

More interested in the "humanitarian" possibilities? Consider how much clean water a billion dollars a day could provide for the Third World masses who die in the millions each year for lack of it.

Think of how those dollars could prevent malaria, which kills more than 650,000 a year — and one child every minute. The malaria control funding gap in Africa — $3.6 billion — would be closed in less than four days.

A billion a day could also develop a drug a day to save lives, ease suffering and generate wealth.

If man-made global warming were a real threat, it might be worth a billion a day to curb its effects. But it's simply conjecture, not hard science. It's a chimera that doesn't deserve our attention, much less our money.

See Also

Politics: The White House has denounced an anti-abortion group's videos of Planned Parenthood's activities as "fraudulent" and circled its wagons to defend the indefensible. What kind of White House is this?For an institution that might argue that it doesn't have a dog in this fight, the White ...

Iran Deal: After initially refusing, the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency will brief senators Wednesday. Are its nuclear monitoring practices kept secret because they're inadequate?Yukiya Amano, the director general of the IAEA, until Friday was refusing to brief senators on ...

Corruption: The third installment of released emails fell hard Friday on the Hillary Clinton campaign. If her candidacy lasts until the end of the summer, there's much more wrong with this country than we thought.Friday had to be an extraordinarily trying day for the Democratic front-runner. On the ...

Regulation: As businesses struggle to stay open and lay off workers, the Environmental Protection Agency is preparing one of the biggest hiring binges in America outside of Google. Good news? Hardly.Barack Obama's EPA has announced it will try to hire 800 new regulators over the next several ...

Taxes Vs. Prosperity: The Real Wedge Issue Ronald Reagan died 11 years ago, and his presidency ended a quarter century ago. But my, how his tax-cutting ideas live on. The living legacy of Reaganomics, or supply-side economics, is that tax rates keep falling all over the world. Imitation really is ...

About Investor's Business Daily

Investor’s Business Daily provides exclusive stock lists, investing data, stock market research, education and the latest financial and business news to help investors make more money in the stock market. All of IBD’s products and features are based on the CAN SLIM® Investing System developed by IBD’s Founder William J. O’Neil, who identified the seven common characteristics that winning stocks display before making huge price gains. Each letter of CAN SLIM represents one of those traits.

Select market data is provided by Interactive Data Corp. Real Time Services. Price and Volume data is delayed 20 minutes unless otherwise noted, is believed accurate but is not warranted or guaranteed by Interactive Data Corp. Real Time Services and is subject to Interactive Data Corp. Real Time Services terms. All times are Eastern United States. *Reflects real-time index prices.